Xandra Gregory

Posted By Xandra on March 12, 2010

Anyone who’s a parent knows that it’s almost impossible for the kids not to show up in the middle of the night and burrow in next to you at least some time in their young lives.  Mine are notorious for midnight flights, and it never ceases to wake me up as soon as I hear the initial *thud.* Followed by the *thumpthumpthumpthumpthump* *bounce* and a pair of cold feet and knobby knees in my internal organs.

Whether from bad dreams, a too-cold bed–even when there’s a cat curled up on someone’s head, or “I heard a noise, Mom, our house is haunted, I swear.” (and no, the house isn’t haunted, it’s three years old and the place used to be a farm and a pasture, if we’ve got the ghosts of anything, it’s cows, squirrels, and the spirits of soybeans past, now go back to bed), my nighttime visitors will snuggle for about ten minutes, just until they fall back asleep, and then–off come the covers.  It gets me to thinking, these late-night invasions, and I’ve been thinking about covers lately.

Book covers, that is.

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Category: An Author's Life, Publishing | No Comments »
Tags: covers, ebooks are different, novel covers

Posted By Xandra on March 8, 2010

But I swear I had a great excuse.  I had a :gasp!: computer issue (easily solvable, I love linux and the community that supports it *in instantaneous realtime, no matter how late it is!*).  Computer, easily surmountable.  Two sick kids with tummy bugs…not so much.  There is no support community or quick fix for that kind of virus.  There is only commiseration from other moms who’ve weathered the vomit comets.  But kids bounce back remarkably well, and I’m grateful that they do.  It reminds me that we, too, can bounce back from setbacks.  And when gut-rot hits a manuscript, by all means, we’re better off if we let it purge itself.

As a writer, it is mega-important for you to figure out your own personal flavor and brand of gut-rot.  I know, ewwwww, right?  But writer’s gut-rot can eat into your work and your writing and your career until you wake up one day and realize that this thing you once loved, you now hate and don’t know why.  So many writer-friends have told similar stories about something in their process, their career, their writer’s life, or elsewhere that unequivocally rotted out their passion from the inside. And if something is rotting in there, it needs to change.

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Category: An Author's Life, Publishing, Writing, Writing Process, Xandra | No Comments »
Tags: Goals, writing goals, Writing Process

Posted By Xandra on February 26, 2010

This week I submitted the sequel to Jolly Rogered.

I’ve been submitting manuscripts since 1998.  Granted, I write slow, and many of my submissions have been to traditional publishing (and via snailmail, to boot), so it’s not as if glaciers move much slower than the process. Every time I do this, I get a little thrill of accomplishment and let myself breathe a sigh of relief at a job done.  But the more I do it, the less time that satisfaction at something being finished feeling lasts.  At first, it was weeks or even a month that I could ride the high of finishing a manuscript and putting together a submission.

Now? I take the rest of the day “off” and clean my bathrooms.

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Tags: manuscript submission, Writing Process

Posted By Xandra on February 19, 2010

A very wise, multi-pubbed chapter member once stood up in front of our local RWA chapter and said, in a quiet voice, “Promo will eat you alive.”

It almost went unheard amidst the exciting chatter about what it was like to get “the call,” work with an editor, decide whether to hire a publicist, and to do that all-important thing every writer wants to do after the first sale–order swag (oh yes, we love the shinies.  Pens, fridge magnets, bookmarks, little bitty bubble bottles with the name of our book stuck to them, hell yeah, we love that shit).  It almost went completely under the radar amidst the talk about how making the USA Today list or the Waldenbooks list or even, gasp, the Times or the Times Extended can change your career (and simultaneously have no effect on your life, because people still don’t recognize you at the grocery store).

She spoke those quiet words, and silence swept the room for just a second.  Things returned to normal shortly afterwards, of course, but those words tucked themselves away in my brain, only to resurface years later after I’d gotten “the email” and wondered, “what next?”

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Category: An Author's Life, Publishing, Writing | 2 Comments »
Tags: epublishing, promo, Publishing

Posted By Xandra on February 16, 2010

I was overjoyed to receive the news that Jolly Rogered received a 4.5-star, Top Pick review from Vallerianna over at Night Owl Romance! It made me squee to see that someone else loved Nigel as much as I do.

It’s easy for a writer to become obsessed about finding reviews–it can really kill your writing time to spend it hunting for mentions of your name or your book’s title, and it’s easy to get lost in the idea of the book you’ve written to the detriment of the book you’ve still got to write.  But when you receive a happy bit of news like this, it can be just the thing to kick start your day.  Hearty thanks to Night Owl for taking the time to read and review Jolly Rogered.  I know I’m one of a great many, and it means something that someone took the time to read and review.

Category: Jolly Rogered, Publishing, Writing, Xandra | 1 Comment »
Tags: Jolly Rogered, reviews

Posted By Xandra on February 12, 2010

In the past seven days, we’ve had about eight inches of snow dumped on us.   No, we’re not nearly as bad as the eastern seaboard and their “Snowmageddon” (or is it “Snowpocalypse”?), but we’ve had our share.   And I’ve done my share in shoveling it, molding it, sliding around on it, and driving in it.  All snow is not the same snow.

All writing is not the same writing, either.  I’ve spent time recently with some very dense, heavy-packed, and slushy snow.  It’s hard to move around.  It doesn’t stick well to other types of snow, either.  Especially at certain temperatures.  Molding writing like that into a story without the same consistency is no picnic.  Trying to mold that dense snow to the icy powder at the next layer is an exercise in futility.  The powder is light and great for skimming over, wonderful for a fast read or action-packed scene, but it’s wispy.  It blows around and rearranges itself according to the wind, or even the shift of what’s underneath it.

To even get the hard-pack to come close to sticking to the powdery stuff, you have to cup your hands around the powder and breathe on it, just enough to melt a teensy bit of it for the dense stuff to grab onto.  And don’t think there’s a shortcut in the future where you can roll your snowball around for a quick and easy expansion–you’ll be fighting for every new millimeter added to its size.  You have to smooth the surface to get it to stick.  Pin those words down with the heat from your hands to ease the heavier stuff into bonding with it.

Then, underneath, is the ice.  The dangerous, subversive stuff.  The hard and unpleasant surprise at the center of a vindictive snowball, or the slick danger that looks like maybe just a patch of wet on the road.  Sometime’s it’s there because the ground was warm, then later cooled with the blanket of snow, freezing it back up after it’s melted.  Maybe it’s there because it’s been packed down and driven over.  Enough pressure has been placed on it that it’s hardened.  Frozen up into something with a smooth surface and a chill of its own to infuse its own properties into that of the other snow types that are making their way into the snowball of a story.  But it’s the ice that’s at the center of the story.  It’s hardest to change the properties of the ice.

Category: An Author's Life, Deep Thoughts, Writing | No Comments »
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Posted By Xandra on February 5, 2010

One of the driving forces that made me want to write Jolly Rogered was one of the heroes, Nigel Fortescue.  Where Roger whispered his story into my ear, and politely waited until I was ready to write, when Nigel finally decided to dish dirt, he did not want to wait for a good time.  He wanted his story told on his terms, and on his schedule.  Lucky for me, he’s charming enough to make me forget that I’m tearing my hair out as I’m writing about his exploits.

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Category: Jolly Rogered, Xandra | No Comments »
Tags: excerpts, Jolly Rogered

Posted By Xandra on February 2, 2010

I’ve blogged before about Harlequin’s decision to include a vanity arm in order to monetize the slush pile.  Suffice it to say that any situation where you pay for the privilege of only getting half the money from the sale of something you’ve created and paid all the money to create is only even remotely good in Bizarro World, and even then, they’d smack you upside the head for being stupid.  I am also a member of Romance Writers of America, an organization ten thousand strong (we are Legion), an organization whose purpose is to “advance the professional interests of career-focused romance writers through networking and advocacy.”

During my time in RWA (I joined in 1996), the organization has consistently advocated for, and educated thousands of aspiring authors on, the traditional means of achieving publication within the romance novel publishing industry.  Which is, to sum up, a fairly straightforward process when viewed from the outside.  It goes something like this: 1.)write a great book with a love story and a happy ending, 2.)send that manuscript to agents and editors of houses who publish romance novels, 3.)sign a contract for an advance and eventually collect royalties after your book has come out for sale in bookstores, and 4.)PROFIT!!!! (Yes, that last is an internet meme joke, and by rights, number 3 should be “???” but if I have to explain, it’s probably not as funny as I think it is, but this is my blog and this is how I ramble roll).  This process was a consistently-modeled (if not easily replicated) process, and could be counted on to be not only the current best practice within the industry, but really, the only practice in the industry that would achieve the results of number 4.  But as the past few years have shown, the only constant is change.

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Posted By Xandra on January 29, 2010

I confess that I am one of those people that literally loathes schedules. My mother is sort of a martinet when it comes to scheduling, and bless her heart for it, ran my household with an iron alarm clock while I was growing up. As a result, I decided to reinvent the wheel when I came of age and I shun scheduling. Perhaps a bit too much, I’ve come to wonder, now that I’ve had kids and all the responsibilities that come with them.

As a result, I tend to write in fits and starts. Or rather, make progress on writing-related activities in a manner of activity better suited for making half a bundt cake disappear in one sitting.  When the glut is long enough to get me from start to finish, this can be a good thing–I sit down, fork in hand, cake plate in front of me, and devour a whole story’s worth of cake  in one protracted binge of writing.  I have the same taste for cake, the same “tone” at the end of the story as I did at the start, and I’m left exhausted, bloated, but with a complete story.  And also really glad it’s a story and not a cake for reals, otherwise I’d be in a sugar-coma and have guilty cake crumbs all over the place.  But, as after the cake-binge, there comes regret.  I look at the disaster that is my house and despair the same way I’d look at that empty cake plate and feel the guilt over the binge lodge right down there in the ol’ upper-GI tract.

So to break the cycle, I’ve adopted a schedule.  I never thought I’d do it (I’m no slave to the calendar, maaaan!).  I still have a hard time conceiving of the logic of actually stopping writing when I feel like I’m on a roll.  But I do it.  Lots of writers set goals for themselves and then stop at those goals no matter what.  And you know what?  I’ve found out it works, sorta.

Some writers set themselves page goals or time goals–and when they’ve reached their goal, they stop.  Flat-out, no ands ifs or buts.  I can’t be one of those people that stops in mid-sentence if I’ve hit ten minutes or 2 pages.  Since I usually use scenes to mark time and progress, I’m pretty much insured against the need to do so.  But it doesn’t prevent me from reaching that goal and realizing that yeah, I’d like to write more, or keep going on this one wound.  And wouldn’t you know it, that feeling seems to follow me from day to day.  I’m making real progress, instead of just vomiting up a brain mess.  And that’s hella better than cake.  Even half a bundt cake in one sitting.

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Posted By Xandra on January 29, 2010

Yeah, you knew the pic was coming with a title like that.  But Jack Sparrow has a point, yanno?  Any pirate worth his salt has to be able to taste which way the wind is blowing.  The same goes for writers.

The minute you press “Publish” on your first blog post, or the minute you make that heart-pounding decision to show your work to somebody who could, one day, maybe give you some money for it, is the minute where you have to become Savvy.  Writers groups speak a lot about writing “the book of your heart” because it’s a phenomenon that broadsides all of us at different times.  Even when we think we’re ready for it and facing the cutlass with both eyes open, only to find out it’s the cannon from the side that’s just pounded us to hamburger.  And what’s that cannon loaded with?  Nothing more or less than the lead shot and gunpowder of The Market.

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